Here’s the original (higher res / higher quality): https://www.skeletonclaw.com/image/628060891450064896
Fun fact: part of the reason your printer needs all toners is because it prints an identification pattern unique to the printer on every document (which uses those colors).
That is NOT the reason. FFS. If that was the case, you couldn’t switch to B&W only printing when you’re out of one of the cartridges, and, shocker!, you almost always can (assuming that you don’t have the absolutely worst printer driver in existence).
I work in commercial printing, and I print in CMYK every single day. Almost nothing is absolutely pure cyan, magenta, yellow, or black. Printing pure black ends up looking like a very washed out charcoal grey. If you want ‘rich black’–which is what most people think of as black, you need to us C,M, and Y. If you had a spectrophotometer and were creating color profiles for your printer, you’d be able to very, very quickly see that. (You’d also be able to see that the colors used in most inks and toners isn’t strictly linear, and that you can start getting weird ‘hooking’ in colors once you exceed a certain ink volume. Some inks are much worse than others in that respect.) Depending on the RIP software that you’re using, and how you create the color profile for the printer, you can specify exactly where greys switch from being monochromatic (K only) to using the full gamut.
It used to be really apparent with our old Roland printers, where you could easily see the individual pixels with a magnifying glass. Now we’re using printers that are higher resolution–I think 600ppi natively, but I see enough dot gain in what we’re printing on that anything past 150ppi is irrelevant–you can’t see them.
There’s a collection of images that I have to print regularly from one of our corporate clients. This collection of images is always sent as greyscale .tif files. When you look at them on-screen, they look fine. When you print them, they’re washed out. The issue is that the RIP software sees the images in greyscale, and defaults to using K only. If I convert the images to RGB (which, yes, I know, it’s weird that I print in RGB when the printer is CMYK, but trust me, it improves color slightly), then the printed image looks like the image on screen.
Its not even a “modern” printer thing. They’ve done this since the 80s.
Specifically, it mostly uses yellow in very faint dots imperceptible to the eye. I actually don’t know if it needs every color, or if it’s just yellow, or if it varies by printer.
Scanners and printers will also detect a pattern of dots which indicates “this is money,” embedded in various clever ways in the design of the art of the money of most countries, and refuse to have anything to do with the images.
You don’t own your devices anymore. And it will, steadily, get worse.
Pffft, this is some conspiracy bs, there’s no way…
googles it
Oh shit… OH FUCK
Though, to be clear, it seems like there are already tools available that you can use to print a bunch of tracking dots all over the page, essentially ‘hiding’ the real tracking dots and making them unusable, so it’s not impossible to get around. Still absolutely wild, and thanks very much for mentioning this, I learned something today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation
I used to have a t-shirt with that pattern.
Unfortunately there are techniques that work with black and white printers too. I don’t know if any have actually been implemented though.
That doesn’t require tracking when you’re the only guy who still uses a dot matrix printer.
Fun fact: your electronic devices that render graphics are completely capable and in my opinion almost certainly do this as well. We use a business version of it at our enterprise and while it is additional software layered over windows, it’s completely imperceptible to the naked eye and I doubt such technology wouldn’t be immediately rolled out as quickly as possible by pretty much everyone at a “top secret” level.
i think life would be more fun if painters refused to paint things ugly and dull colors
And you’re going to need cyan if you want us to photograph your house.
Sometimes is just want a copy of a blank page. No, not a blank page, a COPY of a blank page.
Your fax will include b/w prints of the dust and other edge artifacts of the machine no doubt from the light
You think this is a game!? My fax machine has been detail cleaned, with a custom air-tight gasket sealing the scanner bed. It is situated in a pressurized clean-room with a HEPA filter, behind 2 security doors and monitored by closed-circuit cameras. I’m not an amateur faxer…
